Here's version 2 (September 2013). You can print this at 16.5"x10.75" at 300dpi. Have an ordinary printer? Check out PosteRazor!
Original post from May 2013:
I thought I’d draw a one-page guide for some of the things that people often ask me about or that would help people learn Emacs (and enjoy it). You can click on the image for a larger version that you can scroll through or download. It should print all right on 8.5x11" paper (landscape) if you want to keep it around as a reminder. Might even work at 11x17". =)
You can find the image on Imgur and Flickr too.
If you're completely new to Emacs, start with these Emacs beginner resources. If you're comfortable with Emacs and you want to learn Emacs Lisp, check out my Read Lisp, Tweak Emacs series. For more Emacs inspiration, check out Planet Emacsen.
Feel free to share, reuse, or modify this under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. Enjoy!
Possibly counterintuitive point: if you're a developer or system administrator, t’s good to learn at least the basics of Vim. Despite the perception of a “Emacs vs. Vi” holy war (one of the classic battles in computer science), it makes sense to know both editors especially if you work with people who use Vi a lot. Know enough Vi to find your way around, and then learn how to customize Emacs to fit you to a tee. That way, you’ll avoid the pressure of not being able to work well with your team or your infrastructure, and you’ll have the space to explore Emacs. =) Emacs is totally awesome.
Need help with Emacs? Feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with me. I'm often in the #emacs channel on irc.freenode.net , and I also occasionally schedule time to help people one-on-one. Also, the Emacs community (mailing lists, newsgroups, IRC channel) can be wonderful, so definitely reach out to them too. =)
Meta discussion: How can I make this even better? What else would you like me to draw a guide for? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Also, thanks to dash, nicferrier, fledermaus, ijp, hypnocat, Fuco, macrobat, taylanub, axrfnu, Sebboh, thorkill, jave_, jrm, and the rest of #emacs for suggestions and feedback!
Update 2013-05-18: Check out the conversations on Hacker News and Reddit!

– What else would you like me to draw a guide for?
– Git! Git! Git!
A few more comments: (i) this is awesome. (ii) I guess you called incremental search “interactive search” on purpose, right? (iii) When is part II (intermediate) going to appear?

Oooh, Git would be good. I’ll need to do some research, though – Git boggles me from time to time! <laugh>

(i) Thanks!

(ii) Yeah, incremental is another one of those Emacs terms that I’m not sure people will understand right away… =)

(iii) Intermediate Emacs is harder to think about because the possibilities are so broad! <laugh> It might be interesting to do one on Org and another one on Emacs Lisp…

mbork

(iii) True. For me, a natural choice would be e.g. things like C-t, M-t, M-a/M-e/M-k, since I write *a lot* of texts in natural languages in Emacs (and LaTeX/ConTeXt), but many people never use those commands, I guess. But I think there are a few things good for the intermediate level (Elisp would be too advanced, I guess). One of them would be regexen; another keyboard macros (you mentioned them here, I know, but they deserve more space); yet another, the notions of major and minor modes. Also, the idea of “argument” (as in C-u) is definitely worth explaining. Then, navigation in a buffer (one thing I love in Emacs is C-M-v;)), maybe display tricks like C-l, narrowing, visual-line-mode…

In general, I think it might be a good idea to write something like an alternative Emacs tutorial; the C-h t one is a bit too verbose (and contains imho unnecessary things, like concentrating too much on C-b/C-f/C-p/C-n).

Jeremy Le JyBy

part II could be on the .emacs.d structure for personalizing emacs: it’s helpful even for beginners, and it would be helpful for some like me who started a configuration file .emacs 15 years ago and would like to structure it in the “new” way….

Great job! I am now teaching our office manager emacs, and we will be teaching it in a Cambodian version of hackerschool that we’re starting here in phnom penh and soon in Vientiane, Laos. Maybe we could even translate your one-pager into Khmer and Lao?

One for org-mode would be wonderful. And I like the idea of Git, but do it for emacs users so that it revolves around a workflow using magit for basic stuff and eterm for the more complex….

Excellent! This 13-year user didn’t know about C-h w . I would always invoke M-x and then stare at the mini buffer for the brief message that says what keystroke (if any) it’s bound to.

Undo was on my short list of must-have text editor features. So it was one of the first things I looked up, and I used it often. But I learned the C-x u keystroke, not C-/, even though the latter is shown on the reference card.

This is great. As one of your less code savvy followers, this has prompted me to go a step or two back off the page from where you started and learn a bit about text editors in general. I am curious about VIM, Emacs and some other tools but I am curious about a lot of things. Thanks again for sharing.

naivnomore

Hand drawn one pager is done very nicely. Good work. Succinct intro for beginners. However, It will be nice to have another one pager organized by the most frequently used commands. BTW, what did you use to create this one pager? It is really done very well. Thanks.

xpress razor

Nice tutorial. Once in a while someone posts about Emacs, and I get tempted again to play with the devil. When two three days passes, I find I can’t do something, and I even don’t bother looking it up. I silently go back to vim and wait for yet another tutorial.

Yeap, I had to get all above summarized through (and much more) when starting with emacs. I found this post so illustrative, I’ve enjoyed it. I’m trying with emacs-prelude now and trying to learn lisp. I heard about using slime as IDE for this but I’m still at the “setting-all” stage, so crossing-fingers and go ahead.. thanks for this post..